The Economist explores the topic of consumer research in emerging markets:

“Emerging markets are far more varied and volatile than mature ones. There is little money around: the average income per person in China is around $3,500 and in India $1,000. Cultural complexities are confounding and tastes are extraordinarily fluid. People who are not used to brands flit easily from one to another.

This has turned great metropolises such as Shanghai into vast laboratories of consumer research. Companies are always coming up with new products, or tweaking old ones, to suit local tastes and meet idiosyncratic preferences. Unilever makes its soaps and shampoos foamier than their Western equivalents. P&G produces toothpaste in herbal and green-tea flavours. PepsiCo adds spice to its potato chips. Adidas has created two kinds of shops—“local” ones that specialise in sportswear designed for Asian bodies and “global” ones that sell the same products as in the West. The shopping mall beneath the company’s regional headquarters in Shanghai has one of each kind.

Megan Neese is a senior manager in the Future Lab at Nissan Motor Ltd., a cross-functional team tasked with uncovering new business opportunities for the future of automotive.
In an article for EPIC, she explains how …

Last month the people from Irish UX consultancy Frontend Design looked at the UX revolution in healthcare and how changes in that sector are moving towards putting the customer at the centre of the service. …

TV viewing (live, playback and Broadcaster VOD services) dominates the video viewing of all ages; however 16-24s have a more varied video diet, with TV accounting for two thirds of their total video viewing compared …

Almost all business leaders now acknowledge that they would love to engage in the deep learning that long-term customer observation can foster, but in practice such endeavors are methodically undermined in the fast paced corporate …

Far from being a panacea, small loans add to poverty and undermine people by saddling them with unsustainable debt, argues anthropologist Dr. Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics:
What’s so fascinating about the microfinance …

SocialTimes recently chatted with Amy Parnell, the director of user experience at LinkedIn, to learn more about what goes into a redesign (or a slight tweak).
What kind of research goes into design changes on LinkedIn, …

So, asks consultant Mike Weston, how can marketers cash in without becoming enemies of the people?
Weston writes that the law will be too slow to catch up with digital innovations and that businesses in a …

On May 18th 2015 the Köln International School of Design (KISD) in Germany hosted the conference "Service Design – Redefining the Meaning of Design".
Designers, companies and scientists shared insights on theory and practice of Service …